Opensource tools for inventory and troubleticketing

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1

Hello everyone,

I work for a small service provider starting to offer MPLS services between
Europe and several african countries. At present time we own a small Cisco
network, but we are starting to need a better inventory of services and network
resources and better troubleticketing procedures. We can not afford acquiring
complicated and expensive tools at present time.I would be grateful if you could
recommend me opensource tools to cover these needs.

Thanks in advance

Kind regards

Octavio

2

Yeah, it was about time for this thread again.

My networks are smaller than yours, but I have found that you can stretch
Bugzilla a lot farther as a ticketing system than it's software development
roots might suggest. It handles workflow, to a degree, and is pretty easy
to learn.

If you can't, RT is pretty nice, though quite a bit more complex. It used
to have an asset tracking snap-on, but I don't know what the status of that
is now that the main package has revved to 4.0.

Cheers,
-- jra

3

+1 on RT being awesome, but a little daunting to set up. like so many
things, it's easy once you know how.

Asset tracking of network-enabled devices can be done with netdot very
nicely, as long as the devices implement SNMP properly.

4

try https://abusehq.abusix.com/ or http://wordtothewise.com/products/abacus.html

5

We decided against RT and use Redmine for tickets instead. We find Redmine
to be much more user-friendly.

6

Along related lines:

Anybody have any suggestions for good opensource tools for managing blocks of IP addresses, and domain name assignments - ideally with hooks for updating nameservers and registry databases? Last time I looked everyone was still using either spreadsheets or high-priced proprietary tools - figure it's time to ask again.

Thanks,

Miles Fidelman

7

I've used IPPlan in the past to keep track of both internal and
external assignments, and it worked really well. Super simple to use
and setup. It's a bit of a dated project, but it'll still work pretty
well.

I also just saw this:

http://phpipam.net/

It looks pretty slick. Haven't used it myself, but it looks like it
does the trick as well. I don't know if there's hooks for updating
anything, but since it's coded in PHP, you should be able to write
something up pretty easily.

8

i am aware of

http://www.stanford.edu/group/networking/netdb

which is used widely at stanford and few other places. it’s going through some improvements, according to
my reading of the list. tilburg university appears to be adopting it. not sure if it’s suitable mostly
for an ISP. it uses oracle as the db although the storage layer is supposedly abstracted enough so another
db could be substituted.

9

Try this:
http://nocproject.org

10

I guess it depends on how you define high-priced, but we find the 6connect stuff to be very reasonably priced for a commercial tool with support.

11

+1 for Redmine. I've used most of the open source ticketing systems out there at one time or another, and greatly prefer Redmine over all of them. I've always been a big proponent of open source and only using proprietary software if you absolutely have to (to the point of deploying Linux for internal small-scale firewalling and routing (i.e. VM clusters, test environments) before I'll concede that hardware is required), but I'll admit that Atlassian Jira is probably the best ticketing product out there right now. But it's proprietary and costs money. Other than that, Redmine is the way to go.

-Jason

12

...on Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:37:14AM +0100, Octavio Alfageme wrote:

> network, but we are starting to need a better inventory of services and network
> resources and better troubleticketing procedures. We can not afford acquiring

For the inventory and documentation part, Netdot is pretty cool:
https://osl.uoregon.edu/redmine/projects/netdot/wiki

There's a few things missing for datacenter use (VLANs and address ranges
can only exist once), but I guess that's not particularly relevant for
ISP work. Nevertheless, the network inventory functions are immensely
useful for us - we don't even use most of the advanced functions.

As for ticketing, around here quite a few people are using OTRS
(http://otrs.org/) - but I have no experience with that myself.
Something like Redmine should be more leightweight and will probably
do the job too...

Alex.

13

...on Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:37:14AM +0100, Octavio Alfageme wrote:

> network, but we are starting to need a better inventory of services and network
> resources and better troubleticketing procedures. We can not afford acquiring

For the inventory and documentation part, Netdot is pretty cool:
https://osl.uoregon.edu/redmine/projects/netdot/wiki

Netdot is awesome, single set of VLANs and address ranges aside. If your
switches / devices support all the proper SNMP MIBs, it will draw your
network topology for you.

As for ticketing, around here quite a few people are using OTRS
(http://otrs.org/) - but I have no experience with that myself.
Something like Redmine should be more leightweight and will probably
do the job too...

I've heard good things about OTRS but my personal favorite is Request
Tracker (Request Tracker... So much more than a help desk — Best Practical Solutions). It can be a bit daunting to
get running the first time due to the sheer number of perl modules
required, I'm always happy to help if anyone needs a hand getting it
working.